The Public Editor

A Note to Readers

By DANIEL OKRENT

Published: January 25, 2004

READERS of the Public Editor column will remember that on Jan. 4, I made a lot of clucking noises about quotations that are truncated in such a way as to be misleading. Journalists, I said, are obligated to be extremely careful with the words of those they write about.

But in rendering a quote for my column last Sunday I committed a blunder that could qualify for the headline "Caesar's Wife Slips on Freudian Banana." Sloppiness led me to leave the false impression that reporter David Halbfinger disapproved of an editor's headline on an article he had written for the Week in Review ("Yes, Howard Dean Can Be Toppled and How," Jan. 4).

"I've long since stopped worrying about headlines, as I have no control of them," I quoted him as saying. But I failed to mention that he went on in the same sentence to add that "the headline, to me, was aptly tongue in cheek." To make matters worse, Halbfinger actually used the words "control over them," not "of them."

I suppose I could try to explain how I managed to mistranscribe a quotation in an e-mail message sitting right in front of me, or go through the reasoning that had me cut Halbfinger's comment short. But explanation is not justification.

The mistake was entirely my own, and a pretty embarrassing one it is. My apologies to David Halbfinger, and to the readers.